A quiet workplace is a boon for a developer. Most people ignore the simple fact that nothing great can ever be achieved without the power of focus….or I’d rather say, without time periods of prolonged focus. Hackers refer to this state of mind as “The Zone”.
It helps a great developer to hold the program in his/her head as they work through doing great work. If you’re in this “zone”, your mind is fully focused on the code at hand. You remember all the variable names, the reasons why each loop exists there, the functional flow…everything! Cultivating the ability to get into this zone is of paramount importance in order to do great work. As Paul Graham puts it very elegantly:
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
So, a quiet workplace definitely is very helpful. If a developer is completely in this zone, and one single distraction happens, that pulls his attention off even for 2 mins, it might take him even more than 20 minutes to get back into the zone. A constantly distracted mind can only think of “just-ok” code or even worse, bad & ugly code! Most importantly, the context of work needs to be reloaded onto the active mental workspace…ALL OVER AGAIN! Five such distractions in a day has taken off, or rather destroyed, 1 full hour of highly productive work! That’s why most great developers prefer to work late evenings/early mornings or even on weekends to get critical work done with good quality code. Why? Because there are far lesser distractions!
But we have to practice this “getting into the zone” almost every day to get better at it. The more we practice, the longer periods we can remain in the zone, which will make us more and more productive. Higher the productivity is… and greater the work satisfaction we will have!
[...] needed for being innovative. The power of sustained thought is what you achieve when you are in “The Zone”. A lot of extreme levels of productivity that Hackers achieve are because of their abilities to [...]